I must have done a pretty good job over the years since they never reassign these duties. Don't get me wrong, I get LOTS of help. Luckily I have Mom to help with the tractor driving, Stacy and Kelly help out too and now are kids are getting to the age of actually being helpful and productive. They are also beginning to appreciate a little money in their pockets and that is a great motivator.
We finished picking rocks on the 150 acres of alfalfa a couple weeks ago when we had some warm and dry weather. This is usually the worst part of rock picking. We need to pick all rocks bigger than a baseball. On one 28 acre field this amounted to 3 wagon loads full. On these fields we sometimes spend more time bent over than actually walking. Makes for a long, tough day. It was great to have this wrapped up by the middle of April since last year we didn't finish until June - this springs weather has been so productive!
This past Friday, we started on our corn ground. We have about 850 acres of corn ground to cover, but the good news here is we don't have to pick anything smaller than a cantaloupe. Today we covered 70 acres of corn ground on in 3 1/2 hours. The fields we picked today however had some HUGE rocks in that needed to be moved before we could get in to work the ground. So Kelly and I headed out and quickly ran over about 100 acres to remove the "big ones". These two pictures show what we managed to accomplish in about an hour and a half.
The front half of the wagon...
The other half of our harvest. Notice the handle and shovel head amid the big rocks for perspective.
Not only do we have the pride of knowing we managed to get all those bad boys on the wagon by ourselves, I also managed to find a gorgeous new rock for my flower bed. Now I'm off to get some aspirin...
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